It has in the sense that I don’t know a lot of older Americans who didn’t get just about what they genuinely sought. Most of course set the bar pretty low—from modesty, timidity, inconsistency, indifference—or else were pursuing normalcies like love and family, children, friends and sports, which good humor can obtain without one doing too well on exams or achieving the stratospheric business success that risks a Humpty Dumpty fall. Life is going to go okay when rapport serves as well as sleepless ambition and if the person can weather the occasional divorce or job loss. Indeed, we seem to be engineered for it, and our setting the bar customarily low explains why human nature, human history, don’t significantly improve. Yet by not expecting much, most of us age with considerable contentment—I’ve been noticing lately at senior-center lunches and church suppers—and even die with a bit of a smile, as I remember was often the case during a year I worked in a morgue in my 20s. In that era I might hitchhike across the country with a $20 bill for emergencies tucked into my shoe, whereas half a century later, when in reality I go almost nowhere, I carry at least a thousand in cash in my wallet about this small town where I live.
Why? To bribe the Grim Reaper or maybe merely an EMT as a cushion against indignity? In theory it could purchase the freedom to flag down a taxi and hire a ride of a thousand miles, or enable me to give away tons of money impulsively (not that that’s in the cards either). As your legs lose their spring, money becomes mobility, whether locally or to change the climate for a season. Money can lend woof to life’s warp if the weeks grow monochromatic—greenbacks are “salad” once you have filled the freezer and the furnace or looked for tolerable old-age accommodations. Women with their own careers can move out comfortably on an exasperating husband, like men seeking an autumnal bachelorhood. Nearly any mother’s son descends into a constricted level of activity before buying the farm, as the saying goes. However, people don’t need to join the faithful minority who acknowledge a spiritual presence in their daily rounds to make life work for them. The sunrise blazes as trumpet-colored for the doubters, and nothing prevents them from swinging their young sons and daughters up to straddle their shoulders for the morning strut to school. They can smile up their sleeves at the absurdities of the workplace, as much as any churchgoer, and wind up rather like that particular grandparent one is especially fond of.
We’ve got the option of duplicating qualities we admired growing up, like the generosity of a certain teacher, the loyal, lifelong craftsmanship or professional affiliations of another. Balance tends toward moorage in a safe harbor—and perhaps that smile in old age on a gurney. I’ve seen famine in Africa, Asian poverty, deaths in my own family, but never regarded life as not worth living for mine or other species. In hardship we squint a while, but green and cerulean are the colors of the world and lift our spirits by and by, with energy the syrup of life—which is why I’ve loved cities so much, Cairo and Calcutta as well as Paris and New York. Once we’ve abandoned the notion of channeling Elvis or Einstein to whittle a stance for ourselves, our quotient of contentment is likely to rise. I have public benches on Main Street to sit on or can walk around to the library, not to mention the county courthouse, where I sometimes rubberneck on trial days, observing the sorrowful mishaps individuals blunder into, imagining that maybe a lady wishes to see their private parts or that shoplifting wouldn’t piss off a storekeeper. The parade-ground regimentation of the legal system after an arrest is dwarfed by the byzantine tangle of rituals regarding sex and property it regulates.
I was too afraid of women as a youngster to bumble into trouble by crossing forbidden boundaries. Before then, scared enough by the Sunday school story of the boy Benjamin, in Genesis, chapter 44, ensnared because a “stolen” silver cup has been deliberately planted in his belongings, that I never committed the petty thefts of candy or whatnot my classmates did. But coveting was not a major problem for me. Nor did I later want a jumbo car or house. Cultivating anonymity was better for a writer whose bread and butter was asking questions and watching others inconspicuously. With a few exceptions the masterpieces I admired had not been written by authors of peacock fame. Publishing what I wrote and keeping it in print was my aim, which over the decades I managed to do—as, without feeling like a Pollyanna, I’m inclined to think that others, in different avenues, often parallel. Not so many put all of their eggs in one basket, but that quotient rivals mine. I rarely meet somebody over about 30 who has set his sights upon a goal so front and center that he might irreversibly fail. Instead we retool, “reinvent,” ourselves. Like a bird twitching its wings or a fish its tail, we switch directions in order to upgrade our prospects. Engineers describe becoming marketing executives, science teachers turn to employment as corporate chemists (or vice versa), a backhoe operator is licensed for real estate appraisals, a truck driver puts on a trooper’s uniform, an office manager launches a business of her own, pumping out proposals. My father recalibrated his legal career after being refused a partnership at the firm where he had worked his first 10 years; and in my 30s I realized my aptitudes were better suited to essay writing, after publishing three early novels. Flexibility is the stuff of life. Life is an arc. 感谢您阅读《老年人口比例增加对社会的影响 》一文，留学群(liuxuequn.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
